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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny